Emergent sorting in networks of router agents

Abstract

In this paper we study basic properties of so called Emergent Sorting Networks. These are directed networks which consist of router agents and buffer sites that are located between every two neighbouring agents. The agents can move objects from their input buffer sites to their output buffers. It is assumed that the objects may differ in type and are inserted randomly at an input agent. Brueckner (2000) presented a set of simple local policies for the agents which lead to a sorted outflow (batches of objects of the same type) of the objects out of an output agent. In this paper we introduce a pheromone based variant of the routing policies. The different policies are studied on quadratic and linear network topologies in terms of sorting performance and fairness. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.